Blowing off a Dusty Heart
by Dartxni
Summary: Tru Callings and BuffyTVS. Femslash. Even Heroes need saving sometimes. TruBuffy BuffyFaith
1. He would have had twins: Faith's POV

"Faith, are you Faith?"

I heard the girl's voice speaking behind me and turned to see…myself.

"Fuck!"

"Oh my God, you really do look like me!"

The expletive left my mouth and the slightly more verbose exclamation left hers but our voices matched perfectly. Well, mine may have been a little more horse. Cigarettes, you know.

"Who the fuck are you? I don't have a sister." The girl wore a lab coat and cutely cut clothes beneath it, nice and all, if nice is what you like, but I preferred my own leather pants and hot red lipstick. I suddenly wondered, "Hey, are you a demon? You don't smell like one, but smells can be deceiving."

"What? No! I'm a person!" she protested. Her confused look somewhat assured me but just to make sure I grabbed her arm, ignoring her shriek of outrage and pushed her against the wall of the morgue.

"What are you doing? Faith! You're hurting me!"

It was fucking odd to hear my name said through her lips with my voice.

"How do you know me?" I demanded. I felt her slump against the wall and released my grip enough so that she could slide back to the floor, careful not to give her a chance to fight back. She didn't seem to possess my strength, but I could never be sure.

"A girl, b…Buffy! I saved her life!" she finally gasped out.

The thought of this weak girl,though shelooked like convincingly me, saving Buffy's life, caused me to break out in laughter. My hands went to me knees and I laughed boldly at her as I backed away from the girl, who was straightening her white coat in an effort to make herself more dignified after being lifted bodily from the floor.

"You, you saved Buffy's life? What, you got some magic powers or something? Wait, are you a witch?" The thought suddenly occurred to me, and made a lot of sense. She might have caste a spell on herself so that she looked like me, to fuck with my head or something. Why she would wear a doc's coat over my body escaped my mind though. Suddenly 100 more wary, I pulled a knife from the scabbard at my belt. After Red, I knew that even nice looking girls could pack a punch if they were into Wicca in the bad way.

"Look, Faith, this might seem really odd, but I know about vampires and all that."

"Yeah…so?" Well, it was obvious she knew about vampires if she knew Buffy, especially if she had saved her.

"What I don't understand is what you're doing here. I'm not saving anyone's life, but this seems suspiciously like one of those days." The girl made a cute little perplexed face, chewing on her lip as she thought. I hoped that I had never made a similar face. It was adorable, yes, but tough, definitely not.

"Are you some kind of doctor?" I finally asked.

"What? Oh, no, I'm a morgue assistant and well, I'm trying to make it through medical school but things keep getting in the way."

"But you save lives?" This girl was certainly an enigma. She looked exactly like me, worked among dead people, not unlike myself, and somehow she saved people's lives. I'm nothing if not curious.

"This is really bad of me. You know nothing about me, but I know at least a little about you. Hi. My name is Tru, Tru Davies."

She held out her hand expectantly. I put the knife in my left and shook her hand with my right. She smiled a smile that looked unbelievable trustworthy. I distrusted her immediately.

"Tru, well, you seem to know my name all ready and some fascinating things about my life. But I wanna know about you. And especially why you look like me."

Tru stood there looking stupid for a moment. I looked at the clock 5:32. Damn, sun set at 5:44. I had to get going.

"Ah, whatever, I gotta do my job and then I'll leave."

Tru frowned, "I'm sorry, but what are you doing here?" she asked.

"Gotta keep some corpses from rising from the dead," I told, taking out a stake and walking over to a body that my senses told me was host to newly turned vampire.

"No! Wait!" the crazy girl yelled, grabbing my wrist, not a smart thing but I didn't throw her against the wall too hard.

"I'm trying to kill a vampire here!"

Tru rubbed her head and I felt bad.

"Dangerous blood sucking beasts? I thought you said you knew about vampires?" I grumbled, making ready to stab the cadaver again.

"That's a vampire?" Tru came up beside me. I imagined the vampire awaking to see us. If I was a normal, we would have made his day. He would have had twins for a first dinner.

"I never actually saw a vampire. I saved Buffy from something else," Tru said. She poked the dead body. It was of a teenager, high school age.

"A demon?"

"No…herself," Tru said softly.

I looked at her, startled.

She smiled at me hesitatingly. Ah jeeze, it was weird to see me smiling and not sexing it up.

"She… she just needed someone to… talk to." She shook her head as if to clear the image of a blond slayer from her head. "But ah… how do you know this is a vampire?" Tru asked.

It was a good question. I figured I should give her some pointers, working in a morgue and all.

"Look here," I turned the vampire's neck. Two familiar darkly gaping holes stood out against his white skin. "Vampires drain the blood of their victims. That's why you have to be careful. When a vampire first comes back, it wants nothing more than to drink blood, and lots of it."

"I see."

"You probably don't," I chuckled. I had half a mind to let this one raise and show her what a starved vampire was like, but decided I wasn't really in the mood. "Now, do you mind?"

"What? Oh," Tru stepped back.

I plunged the stake into the vampire's chest. It exploded in a cloud of dust.

"My god, Faith!"

"Fuck yeah! Don't you love the smell of grave dust?"

Tru helped me quickly go around and find three more corpses-soon-to-become-vampires. The last one she found on her own, or rather it found her. I had missed my 5:44 deadline.

"Hey Sucker!" I yelled at the brawny man who had backed Tru into a corner. "Suck this!"

Corny, yes, but it was a line I liked, especially when I was showing off. And yeah, I was showing off. I ran at the vampire and kicked it over a standing cot, which it knocked over with a clatter. I walked up to it confidently as it pulled itself to its feet.

"Hey, ugly, Do you want me for dinner?" I shimmied suggestively. It lunged. Newly risen vamps tend to be pretty stupid. "Sorry, but all we got is stake."

An explosion of dust and Tru was smiling at me with a look of amazement on her face. That look of gratitude always does feel good. I must say, I've used my hero's status to get into people's beds hundreds of times.

I handed the stake to Tru.

"What…?"

"Keep this. For your protection," I told her. She took it and fiddled with it, rubbing her hands up and down the smooth wood and testing the point. Finally she looked up at me.

"I think you should find Buffy."

Buffy obviously hadn't told this girl much about me.

"We don't get along."

"I think you guys have unfinished business."

"What? Did she try to kill you?"

"No."

"I'm surprised."

"She kissed me."

I stared at the girl, Tru, my double. I laughed out loud.

"Well, I'll be. I didn't know B had it in her."

I left the morgue whistling.


	2. Blazing, Brilliant and Mad: Tru's POV

I watched as Buffy looked soullessly at the girl who lay dead in the alley. She touched her curly brown locks and let her hand wander across the girls stiffening cheeks.

"So dumb" she said. "I do all I can to save these people. I do all I can to keep them from the dark. I have given my life for these people and the lives of all the people I have ever loved. And then they will go and kill each other for a couple of dollars in a wallet. It's just so stupid."

I could not speak; a lump in my throat inhibited me. I tried to tell her that I understood, that I knew what she is going through. Our jobs, though different, are the same, and they do make a difference, I want to tell her. They do.

She stood up from where she had been kneeling over the body and walked purposefully to me. Mud stained her knees. She was shorter than me by a few inches, but the power of her gaze was so much more than mine. She stood in front of me, looking me directly in the eyes as if challenging me. I knew that behind those eyes was some great terrible emotion, but instead of revealing all her eyes masked it totally. They were the eyes of a woman who had seen hell over and over and over again and not lost her sanity. Instead she has lost something far more fundamental. Was it hope or her soul, or are the two the same, I wondered.

"You look so much like her" her voice was full of wonder; her eyes were still dead. Her hand reached up to trace my face, the way she had traced the dead woman's face. I wondered if the phantom I reminded her of was dead as well. "You could be her."

I breathed heavily, almost hyperventilating. Something horrible was about to happen. Something horrible that had happened before.

Buffy's hand slid down my jaw, curled around my neck. Her thumb rested on my pulse point, pressing lightly, considering and suddenly reckless. She seemed to be reflecting on the fact that she could easily kill me. It was a moment I would not soon forget. The demigod held my mortality in her hand but chose to let it free.

"Been there, done that." Buffy said roughly. Her hands went behind my neck and pressed my head down to her level. Her lips reached up and aggressively kissed me. I knew at that moment that something had gone wrong. I was not going to save her this time. I let her continue kissing me, knowing that the gesture was futile. When she had finished, the mask of her eyes had cracked. Emotion, blazing, brilliant and mad spilled from under her lids.

"I never did that to her. I tried to kill her, but it did nothing. I should have done that instead." Energy seemed to consume her body. She walked restlessly away from me, every movement a judgment. He foot touched the leg of the dead girl and something in her cracked. Tears began streaming down her face, dripping from her chin, splashing on the front of her windbreaker. Her mouth hung open, quivering. Her eyes sought mine and asked for absolution.

"I can't do it any more. They all die. They all die. No matter what I do, they all die." I stepped toward her.

"No Buffy. It's not your fault. You save them" I pleaded with her. Even dead eyes were better than this, better than the self-hate.

"I don't! I don't save enough of them. And they are killing me! Every time: every time another woman dies, ever time a young boy is turned into a monster it kills me. Every time I stake a freshly risen Vampire, I know that it only arose because I failed to protect it. I. Can't. Do. It. Any more."

Even as her hand went into her pocket, I lunged at her. I tried to grab her arm but she swung me easily as if I weighed nothing and I went flying into the wall, knocking my head. I got up woozily, seeing double, but it was too late. A switchblade glinted in the light of the street lamp before she plunged it into her stomach.

"I'm sorry." She said and died.

I sat shivering in the dirt, in a New York alley beside the two dead women for an hour, until finally Buffy's head reanimated, turned to me and spoke.

"Try again."


	3. Dusty Heart: Buffy's POV

Blowing off the dust  
  
I met her in a seedy dive below a New York sky scraper. I had followed some vamps dressed as prostitutes into the place's female bathroom. I dusted them in front of yellow mirrors and their dust was added to other dust already on my clothing.  
She stepped out of a stall then and I started in surprise.  
"Faith!"  
"My name is not Faith." She said a knowing smile on her face. It left replaced with a look of insecurity. She was bolstering her purpose.  
I stepped toward her and walked a full circle around her, looking her up and down thrice.  
Satisfied, "No you are not."I agreed with her. "But what's a good girl like you doing in a place like this." I affected a drawl. I can't stop making jokes. If I ever did, I think it would be time to die. And she did not belong here. Her cutely cut t-shirt and form fitting pants were all right for clubbing, but she was better than this club.  
"I was waiting for you."  
"Oh." My surprise was somehow less than it should have been.  
"Come with me."  
"I followed willingly enough, I was willing do just about anything that night. Stake vampires or not stake vampires, I was staking vampires right now because patrolling all these years had made me an insomniac. Or perhaps becoming a slayer had made me an insomniac. Either way, it was all the same. Slaying was patrolling, patrolling was killing, killing saved people, saving lives was killing dead people. So, I killed dead people that good people with souls and without them could sleep safe and not fear the apocalypse too badly. But I could have not killed dead people just as well.  
Outside the smoky dive, the better twin of Faith shrugged on a wind breaker. She did not speak, did not seem to expect me to. We walked that way, side by side, strangers but somehow not, for about two blocks before I heard a scream. Reflex found a stake in my hand. I couldn't even recall, looking at it, where I had brought it from.  
The woman took the stake from my unresisting fingers and exchanged it with her hand.  
"It is a mugging, "She said, "By the time we get their, the victim will be dead."  
That was the first time I realized she was more than she seemed, although I should have guessed before, but my world-weary heart had refused to see. I welcomed any reprieve from my calling.  
We had stopped before a ritzy hotel, bright and clean amongst the night-stained streets. At the tug of her hand, I followed her past the night crew, to the elevator, and up. As we rose, she brought me close and encouraged me to lean against her taller frame. Faith had never been so kind.  
Her room key was 4231. I remember because they were the first four digits, and also because that was the combination to my high school locker.  
  
She led me inside and led me to her bed, where with touches she encouraged me to lay down. As she began taking off my dust covered clothes I thought to myself, Of course. When you are this tired, you don't question much at all.  
The first time she made me come, I cried out Angle! and the second time I shouted out Faith! She looked at me intensely at that moment and I wondered, only half aware again, who she was.  
At that point, I asked her, "Why?"  
"To save your life."  
Undone I lay back and slept for a few hours. When I awoke, not-Faith was sleeping on my shoulder. Gently I rolled her over and began licking her shoulder, and then her pulse on her neck, where I had always wanted to bite Faith. She did not cry anyone's name, but the sound of her sighs and moans breathed new life into a soul turned to dust by overexposure to the world's cruel winds.  
When I awoke, the bed beside me was still warm, although the room was empty. She had left a note in the bathroom mirror. It said:  
  
Slayer: Live so that others may live.  
Live so that good may prevail  
Live so that some 15 year old girl does not wake to a too heavy destiny.  
But above all, live in the light.  
  
I got up that day. I rented a car. I drove out of the city and into the mountains. I heard the birds singing songs in honor of the sun.  
I lived that day, and would continue to live some for some time yet, because a kind woman told me to and I had yet to pass on her gift to the world. 


End file.
